A Novel Approach for Mining High‐Utility Sequential Patterns in Sequence Databases

Mining sequential patterns is an important research issue in data mining and knowledge discovery with broad applications. However, the existing sequential pattern mining approaches consider only binary frequency values of items in sequences and equal importance/significance values of distinct items. Therefore, they are not applicable to actually represent many real‐world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for mining high‐utility sequential patterns for more real‐life applicable information extraction from sequence databases with non‐binary frequency values of items in sequences and different importance/significance values for distinct items. Moreover, for mining high‐utility sequential patterns, we propose two new algorithms: UtilityLevel is a high‐utility sequential pattern mining with a level‐wise candidate generation approach, and UtilitySpan is a high‐utility sequential pattern mining with a pattern growth approach. Extensive performance analyses show that our algorithms are very efficient and scalable for mining high‐utility sequential patterns.